The building itself is Standard American Grade School with gray cement lintels over light tan bricks. Art Deco letters stating the school’s name were poured into cement, striving to make it look like the district hired a stonemason.

It’s an Art Deco starter set of a building, a school designed by someone who once heard of Frank Lloyd Wright. The windows are covered now.

There’s a relatively new but definitely crumbling playground around the back. Some plastic is melted, some chains are bent or broken. Some of the padded foam mats that replaced the mulch and gravel of my era of swingsets are missing. I don’t think children come here anymore. I later find why. » Read the rest of this entry «

In morning, men who look like Santa Claus hop out of pickup trucks by the train tracks.

They’re in construction hardhats and neon clothing loud enough to give the engineer enough time to notice them and feel terrible forever before the train crashes into them. To a man, they’re white and fat. The old ones have burly white beards down to their collarbones. The younger ones, still in training, only have rolls of scruff barely reaching Adam’s apples.

It made sense, of course. Calumet Fisheries on the 95th Street Bridge is for all comers. Rich and poor, young and old, black and brown and white all file in by car or bike to the little shack on the Calumet River. » Read the rest of this entry «